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By the two-time winner of the Giller Prize for his novels  The Book of Secrets  and  The In-Between World of Vikram Lall Uhuru Street  is M.G. Vassanji’s stunning book of linked stories, set within the Asian community of Dar es Salaam. With delicate strokes, and with irony and humour, Vassanji brings alive the characters who live and work in the shops and tenements of Uhuru Street; among them: Roshan Mattress, so called because of her free and easy ways; a street-wise orphan fighting for survival; a Goan dressmaker who entertains her employers with local gossip; and a servant who opens up the world for the children in his charge, until he oversteps his bounds and has to leave. As the younger generation searches for a new destiny, and the older fiercely holds on to the past, Uhuru Street   resonates with the moment of moving on, of leaving the place where we have roots, knowing that things will never be the same. ...

Shan Sa has an extraordinary CV. Born in Beijing, she started writing at seven and enjoyed success as a teenage poet. At 18 she moved to Paris to study, worked for the artist Balthus and won a Goncourt with her first novel (she writes in French), a Prix Cazes for her second and another Goncourt for this, her third, which is also being filmed. At a time when Chinese women's fiction in translation tends to be auto-biographical, it is a relief to discover The Girl Who Played Go . Shan Sa's first book to be translated into English shows her to be more interested in narrative form and history than in self-exploration. A carefully wrought novel, set within the framework of the board game, go, it takes place in a small city in Japanese-occupied Manchuria in 1936. An unnamed Japanese soldier has been sent with his battalion to seek out the Chinese resistance movement within the region, a gateway, he believes, for the glorious death that has long been his ambition. Meanwhile, a bored

What does baklava, a Greek pastry, have to do with a girl growing up in a bi-cultural Jordanian/American family? This question stumped me the minute I picked up Diana Abu-Jaber’s new book,  The Language of Baklava . The answer is revealed midway through the story and, surprisingly, it makes perfect sense. The title is fitting because as this book progressed I was never quite sure how everything would fit together&#8212but, then again, neither was the author. The Language of Baklava  is Abu-Jabar’s third book, all of which touch on some aspect of Arab-American culture. In this book, we are taken on an auto-biographical journey with the author, as she struggles to find her own identity while retaining both her Jordanian and American heritage. As a young girl, Abu-Jabar seems to feel that she must “choose” whether to be Arab or American. Yet as she grows and matures, her life experiences show her that perhaps she can embrace the best of both cultures without being disloyal to eithe